A Conversation with Terry BrooksI discovered Terry Brooks when Running With The Demon came out in 1997,
starting his current "real" world fantasy series. When Knight Of The
Word, the second book in the series, came out I put him on the list of authors I
wanted to interview for SFRevu. Now he's written the novelization of Star Wars Episode
I: The Phantom Menace, and Lucasfilm has him bound and gagged in a secret location
somewhere far, far, away.

Thanks to our contacts at Del Rey, however, I was
able to get enough together bring you this conversation with the author. Not an actual
interview perhaps, but an amazing simulation.

Our review of Phantom Menace follows that, and I've tried not to
give too much of the story away. For those of you who missed them, I've included our
reviews of Running With The Demon and A Knight of the Word
as well.

- Ernest Lilley, SFRevu Editor.

Q: How much time did you actually spend with Lucas himself during the writing of
Phantom Menace? Can you describe the process you went through with him?

A: We spent roughly six hours together in face-to-face meetings followed by a
lengthy conversation over the phone during which we discussed deep background. George gave
me what I needed to craft the movie adaptation in a way that satisfied both his vision and
my own.

Q: Your first book, the massively successful Sword of Shannara, and Lucas's
signature movie Star Wars, were both released in 1977. You also shared the same book
editor. Did you ever think you and he would be collaborating the way you are now?

A: I never thought I'd be collaborating with George. When I first got the phone
call from my publisher I thought I was probably a strange choice to write this movie
adaptation. It was only after I started to consider carefully what George does that I
realized we were a perfect match and that our approach to story telling is very much the
same.

Q: What do you have in common with Lucas?

A: We both write adventure stories. What George is doing with the Star Wars
series is very similar to what I did with my Shannara books. When creating a
lengthy, historically based, imaginary tale you have to do a lot of thinking about
beginnings, endings, and the links between different generations of characters. After we
had spoken several times it was clear to me that George had done that and that his prep
work was very good. He didn't just throw something together with the hope that it would
turn out okay. I'm a compulsive organizer about my own work and I could see that George
was the same.

Q: What makes this book more than a novelization of the movie?

A: There were certain things George couldn't put in the movie that were crucial to
understanding the story. He originally wanted more of a focus on Anakin Skywalker but he
couldn't see how to do deep background on Anakin without changing the fast-paced nature of
his film. In movies you have to develop your characters either through conversation or
action. There's no aside to let you know what's going on in the character's head. The
leisurely pace of a book, on the other hand, allows more time to focus on background and
on what makes characters tick. Thus when George and I talked about how to make this work
we decided to open the book in an entirely different place than the movie. We devoted a
number of chapters to Anakin's character and background both preceding the period of time
in which the movie opens and also during times in the movie where there was a reason to
take a deeper look at this boy. The book also allowed us to focus on other characters such
as the Jedi Master Qui-Gon Jinn. Readers will learn why he is such a rebel and what drives
him.

Q: You are well known for creating fascinating worlds from scratch. But with The
Phantom Menace the basic attributes of the various characters - Jedi, droid, Hutt, Sith
Lord and so on-as well as the worlds in which they live had already been established. What
was it like working within pre-arranged parameters?

A: Fortunately I had written my own prequel to the Shannara series several
years ago - a book called First King of Shannara. In writing that book I
had to take a whole set of established characters and events and fit them into a fixed
historical pattern. The story needed to be interesting, exciting, and not just a retelling
of what was already known. That was good training for this project. In the case of Phantom
Menace and the Star Wars saga we already know that Anakin Skywalker will
eventually become Darth Vader. So the interesting story is how does this wonderful little
nine-year-old boy turn into such a dark villain. What happens to him? What kind of
character is he that allows it to happen? And, more to the point, what is going on inside
his head.

Q: Where there any points at which you wanted to take the characters in one
direction and Lucas in another?

A: No. I asked a lot of questions early on about what I could and couldn't do.
There were things George told me about the motivation for why characters were doing
certain things or why the story was going in a certain direction that he didn't want to
get into until movies two and three. He said I could hint at them but I could not give
them away.

Q: What challenged you most in working on this project?

A: With a project like this you have to fight the tendency to treat it as something
less than your own work. Because it's an adaptation of someone else's screenplay, you
sometimes tell yourself you can slough off. My challenge was not to do that and to find a
way to make the movie's adaptation into a novel that could stand on its own two feet. What
both George and I wanted from the beginning was to make the reading experience independent
from the movie experience.

Q: Do the worlds of Star Wars and Shannara have anything in common?

A: They have much in common. They are both generational sagas involving
families, friends of families, their descendants, and their ancestors. They also each
contain an element of power which impacts the families and various characters in much the
same way. There's not a lot of difference between Shea Ohnisford - from my Shannara
series - and Luke Skywalker. Both are characters who come from a somewhat sheltered
background. They both get thrown into a situation not of their own making and find out
they are heirs to a great deal of power. And they each exercise enormous responsibility
for their people. I think the way George and I talk about the uses of power, coming to
grips with power, and the way power infects people who are privy to its use are very much
the same. The greatest difference between us is that George's stories take place in a
setting of advanced technology. My Shannara stories take place in a world where
technology has been virtually obliterated and where magic is the driving force of any
advancement.

Q: How do you keep a sense of mystery and suspense in a prequel-a story in which
everyone already knows the end result?

A: It's not easy. You have to find ways to make the action unfold. You do that
through good storytelling. You can take any story that you already know and make it
exciting if you tell it the right way. Even though we know the outcome of the mythologies,
epic adventures, and stories we tell about our families and ourselves again and again, we
can still find in them certain elements that are scary, funny, or surprising if we tell
those stories correctly.

Q: What do you want readers to get out of this book?

A: From the beginning George and I wanted readers to see this book as
a valuable companion piece to the movie. My job is not to re-work what he's done. What I
have tried to do instead is to give readers another picture of his story. I want the
bookreading experience to be another occasion in which fans will say "wow that's
wonderful." If people are paying attention I do think there's going to be a
tremendous amount of discussion about where George is going with all this. In some ways
this is a more controversial story than the first three movies.

Q: Youve written 14 previous novels in the past 20
years, each one a New York Times bestseller. Has your success come as a surprise?

A: I wrote my first book, Sword Of Shannara, over a
period of years, while I was going to school and practicing law, and I sent it to Lester
Del Rey at Ballantine after it was rejected by DAW. Lester picked it out of the slush
pile, and wrote back to me. He compared my book to Lord of the Rings, one of my
favorite works and one that most influenced me, but he wanted a rewrite. Anyway, several
rewrites later, Del Rey Books did publish my first novel, and it did become the first work
of fiction on the New York Times trade paperback bestseller list. I dont
think I knew enough to have any particular expectations. I thought that was a normal
experience. Of course, I know better now, and Im certainly pleased; its worked
out pretty well.

Q: Youve had a great deal of success writing in
the worlds of Shannara and The Magic Kingdom. What made you switch to the
"real" world?

A: I spent forty years of my life in Sterling, Illinois, which
became the prototype for Hopewell, where Running With The Demon takes place. If you
spend forty years anywhere, it tends to have some sort of effect. In my case, I think the
effect was a good one. Growing up, I didnt have a lot of toys, and personal
entertainment depended on individual ingenuity and imagination -- think up a story and go
live it for an afternoon. I wanted to say something about the nature of childhood, and
what it is like to grow up in a small town. I wanted to explore how, for children, the
line between fantasy and reality is nebulous, how "make believe" is real for
children, and a part of everyday life.I also felt it was time for a change. A
Knight Of The Word and Running With The Demon are very different books from my
previous novels. Theyre contemporary and dark. Theyre set in places Ive
lived, or places very much like them, and theyre about the apocalypse and one
mans attempt to stay its coming.

Q: A Knight Of The Word deals with homelessness and
other pressing social issues. This seems like a change of pace for you  why did you
decide to write about these things?

A: Ive always tried to write about issues I feel strongly
about or that Im tied to in some way. The last book dealt with alcoholism, and with
growing up in a small town. I now live in a city that has a large homeless population, and
because its a socially conscious city, it has programs for homeless people and for
the victims of domestic violence very much like the ones I wrote about in the book.
Ive always written about the struggle between good and evil, and homelessness is one
of the biggest evils in our society. For the purposes of storytelling, big issues are
frequently drawn in black and white. In reality, theres really a lot of gray;
theres not just one answer or solution, not just one way to make the world better,
and thats why real-world solutions are so much harder to find. The next book will
deal with the issue of drugs, not only the obvious issue, but drugs in the form of
medication, and the way we make our lives more palatable.

Q: Why does fantasy have such a great appeal for you as
a writer and as an individual?

A: Again, the answer is in my childhood. When I was a kid, we
had to rely on our imaginations for entertainment. I remember one winter, when I was about
five or six, I spent three days with another boy, tracking a bobcat that had been sighted
in another county fifty miles away, but which I was sure had come into our neighborhood.
One summer we played for a week at being Knights of the Round Table, using broom handles
as swords and lances and metal garbage can lids as shields. In bad weather, I spent hours
drawing action figures on paper, coloring them, backing them on cardboard, then cutting
them out and creating whole stories around their lives. What I learned from this, early
on, was that if you could imagine it, you could create it. And if you could create it, you
could live it. Fantasy is the only canvas large enough for me to paint on. It lets me
capture the magic I felt reading my favorite books, and of imagining my own worlds. A
world in which elves exist and magic works offers greater opportunities to digress and
explore. I think that it gives both the reader and writer more room to play.

Q: What writers influenced you most?

A: The books I grew up reading were adventure stories, bigger
than life, but with characters you could understand and admire. I read Edgar Rice
Burroughs and Zane Grey, and I read H.G. Wells and James Fenimore Cooper. In seventh
grade, I began reading everything I could find in Science Fiction -- Isaac Asimov, Andre
Norton, Robert Heinlein and Lester del Rey; the field was a lot smaller then. My
breakthrough as a reader was when I discovered the European adventure story writers.
Alexander Dumas, Robert Louis Stevenson, Sir Walter Scott, to name a few. The thing they
all had in common was that the stories were so large and wonderful and the worlds they
wrote about were so compelling that weeks after reading one I was still living it and
imagining how it might have been, wondering what the characters were saying to me about my
own life. Later, of course, I discovered and loved J.R.R. Tolkien, for many of the same
reasons.

Q: What about the future -- Will you keep writing in the
contemporary world, or will you go back to Shannara?

A: For a writer, its very attractive to stay in one world
for a time. After all, you put a lot into creating a universe and everything that goes
with it, and it seems a shame to use it only once. I have two more Shannara books
planned, but they wont be out for a few years, and I have one more book planned to
follow A Knight Of The Word, with some recurring characters, most notably Nest
Freeman and John Ross.

Q: What are your goals as a writer?

A: Well, I think that as a country, weve drifted away from
appreciating the importance of imagination. Non-fiction outsells fiction almost three to
one. We are obsessed with true crime stories and tabloid journalism, and were
fascinated by tell-all biographies. We forget that what matters begins with the
imagination. Writing fantasy lets me imagine a great deal more than, say, writing about
alligators, and lets me write about places more distant than Florida, but I can tell you
things about Florida and alligators, let you make the connection all on your own. I want
you, as a reader, to experience what I experience, to let that other world, that imaginary
world that I have created, tell you things about the "real" world. I want to
kick-start your imagination and let you discover the places it can take you.

Knowing what's going to happen isn't the
same as knowing how. Terry Brooks' novelization of The Phantom Menace adds a
sense of destiny and of foreboding without taking anything away from the story.

Collect all Four! Phantom Menace comes in 4 different
covers...just what we needed.

Knowing what's going to happen
isn't the same as knowing how. I've wondered how Lucas was going to make the
prequels to a story we know so much about interesting, but on the first page of Terry
Brooks' novelization of The Phantom Menace, I saw that what we know adds a sense of
destiny and of foreboding without taking anything away from the story.

The story explodes in a Ben Hur-like burst of energy. Pod-racing, it's called, and it
bursts across the page with a promise of SFX to come. Twin rocket engines lashed to a
cockpit hurtling across the desert of Tatooine. One pilot is a nine year old slave boy
with an uncanny sense of his surroundings and his machine. The future echoes in my brain,
and I hear Obi-Wan's voice: "Your father was a great pilot too." Out of the
machine climbs the young Anakin Skywalker.

After ten thousand years, the peace of the Republic is about to be shattered, as surely
as the quiet of the Tatooine desert.

Elsewhere, two Jedi emissaries are sent to negotiate the end of a trade blockage of the
planet Naboo. In response to Republic taxation of interstellar trade routes, the Trade
Federation has blocked traffic to Naboo, to force the Republic's hand. A curious response,
not at all in keeping with the Federation's normally careful trading.

"These people are cowards. They will not be hard to persuade. The negotiations
will be short." Short indeed, because they hide a trap that the Jedi barely escape
with their lives, taking refuge on the planet below.

Naboo is overrun by the Trader's army of battle droids, and The Jedi attempt to flee to
Coruscant, the capital world of the Republic, to plea for assistance for the besieged
world. Along with them are the young Queen of Naboo and a froggy alien named Jar Jar Binks
they came across during their escape. Jar Jar is a member of the "other" race
living largely out of sight on Naboo, content to have nothing to do with the technological
civilization of the Naboo. He happens to be an outcast, due to a real knack for getting
into trouble, and just the sort that Jedi Qui-Gon finds helping irresistible.

Soon they find themselves stranded on Tatooine seeking parts for their damaged ship,
and Qui-Gon's Jedi sense leads him to trust the young Anakin in whom the Force runs
incredibly strongly.

Jedi are chosen soon after they are born, and the Jedi council will probably reject
Anakin as a candidate because of his age, but collecting strays of hidden value is
Qui-Gon's strength and weakness, and young Skywalker's life becomes bound up in their
adventure. Qui-Gon is convinced that Anakin is the boy foretold in prophecy, one that will
bring balance to the Force. Indeed, there is a great disturbance in the Force, and its
name is Anakin Skywalker.

The Dark Side of the Force is represented by Darth Sidious, the Sith master, and Darth
Maul, his protégé. The Jedi seek serenity, while the Sith, founded by a renegade Jedi,
seek control. After ten thousand years of Jedi influence, the wheel is about to turn.

We meet the earlier versions of characters we've known from before. We collect a
protocol droid here, an astromech unit there, face the head of the Jedi council, a short
green alien (with such annoying sentence structure, he has, no?). Young Obi-Wan is very
like Luke Skywalker will be - strong with the Force, but impatient, straining against his
mentor's urgings to focus on the now. And At the center of everything is Anakin, a slave
all his life, seeking freedom for himself and his mother, dreaming prescient dreams of
battles and glory.

This story holds together as an episode in the Star Wars Saga, complete
with the obligatory party/ceremony at the end, but it's clear that it will take all three
of the planned movies to complete. It also raises a new question of its own. who was
Anakin's father?

Unlike much of the Star Wars fiction written over the last few years Star
Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace is both well written and officially sanctioned.
Terry Brooks has provided a good voice for the film, and I was left wanting to see the
realization of the scenes on the big screen.

Great SF lit? Maybe not, but it's definitely a story that you can get caught up in. I
kept hearing John William's score as I read, and I could almost see the SFX . Still, I am
troubled by the age of the main character. It smells like a marketing decision to me,
intended to hook pre-teens in at the start of their buying lives. Oh well, hopefully kids
will enjoy it, though I fear that adults will shake their heads a bit at nine year old
Anakin's daring doings and precocious wooing.

My favorite Star Wars film was the original. Simple, exciting, heroic.
The next two films seemed contrived, trying to make a bigger story out of a simple
conflict between good and evil. The Phantom Menace is not simple, in fact it may be
a bit busy, trying to get the characters on the stage and set up the conflicts that will
drive the story arc. For those of us raised on the original, it resonates with a sense of
destiny. Coming to know Anakin and the Jedi, we begin to see that he is not just an
instrument of evil, but of change. We can only hope that the new generations to see it
will find it as exciting as we did, once upon a time, in a galaxy, far, far away.

Magic runs in the
Freemont family. For seven generations the women of the family have been charged with the
stewardship of Sinsinippi Park, warding off the mindless "feeders" that no one
can see and maintaining a balance of magic with the help of Pick, a Sylvan ("Don't
call me an Elf!") and his forest friends. Nest Freemont is a normal 14 year old girl
if you discount her prodigious athletic ability and the strength of the magic inside her,
or the way her future self keeps popping up in visions of a dark future. Nest's mother
died mysteriously when she was an infant, and no one will tell her about her father; not
her grandmother, who wielded the power in her time, not her grandfather who can't see the
magic, not even Pick.

Two men, or things that were once men, come to town as it readies itself for the Fourth
of July, and tries to forget the strike that has shut down its sole source of industry,
the steel mill. One is a demon in human flesh, come to tip the balance of power towards an
apocalyptic future, the other a Knight of the Word, sworn to the service of an ancient
power, sworn to stop the demon and his kind, forsaking his humanity in that service. They
have both come for Nest. On her future rests the future of mankind, a future that John
Ross, Knight of the Word, dreams all too vividly in the desperate visions of what the
future might be if he fails.

The story climaxes in a battle which is clearly part of a larger war. This awareness,
along with the author's superb storytelling skill leaves you in suspense as the story
moves towards its conclusion. Nest and her band of teenage friends are as well realized as
the adult and elderly characters. Though there is some adult content, it is handled with
restraint and should make this acceptable for mature teens as well as the adult readers
it's aimed at.

Long
ago, the Welsh hero Owain Glyndwr was chosen by the Lady of the Word to carry her magic
into the world and battle the demonic force of the Void. Centuries later English teacher
John Ross is called to her service, carrying a staff that fills him with the power to
defeat the invisible demons feeding on mankind's lusts and hatreds. A staff that cripples
him as well, to remind him that he has been bound to the Lady's service. When Ross dreams,
he dreams of terrible futures where mankind has turned on itself in an orgy of mad
destruction the evil feeds upon. Terrible futures he has a chance to prevent.

Though he succeeded in the first book, John Ross takes the stage in A Knight Of
The Word broken by failure. The blood of children he had gone to save from a
tragedy foreseen in his dreams is more than he can bear and he sets aside his staff to do
no more harm. Unfortunately, his burden is not one that can be surrendered, and he will
either be taken as a prize by the Void, destroyed by the Word, or saved by a friend.

Once rootless, John Ross has found a new life in Seattle working with Simon Lawrence, a
celebrated champion of the homeless, and a different kind of magic in the love of
Stephanie Winslow, a beautiful woman whose love heals the scars he carries. Terry Brooks
brings back Nest Freemark, the young woman of power he saved in the first book. Much as
Ross saved Nest from the demons seeking to turn her in the first book, she is now called
upon to save him, unleashing the magic within her once more. Close at hand a demon waits
to take him into the service of the Void, but with its ability to take any form it
chooses, how can Nest find it in time to save him?

Running With The Demon gave a tremendous start to this series, and A
Knight Of The Word carries its momentum forward every bit as strongly. If Demon
smells of Bradbury, with its small town and summer nights, Knight reeks
of King in a darkly urban setting. Both books are superb Fantasy, and the sequel is
self-contained enough to read alone.

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